This book presents the theory of optimal and critical regularities of groups of diffeomorphisms, from the classical work of Denjoy and Herman, up through recent advances. Beginning with an investigation of regularity phenomena for single diffeomorphisms, the book goes on to describes a circle of ideas surrounding Filipkiewicz's Theorem, which recovers the smooth structure of a manifold from its full diffeomorphism group. Topics covered include the simplicity of homeomorphism groups, differentiability of continuous Lie group actions, smooth conjugation of diffeomorphism groups, and the reconstruction of spaces from group actions. Various classical and modern tools are developed for controlling the dynamics of general finitely generated group actions on one-dimensional manifolds, subject to regularity bounds, including material on Thompson's group F, nilpotent groups, right-angled Artin groups, chain groups, finitely generated groups with prescribed critical regularities, and applications to foliation theory and the study of mapping class groups. The book will be of interest to researchers in geometric group theory.

This book consists of five chapters presenting problems of current research in mathematics, with its history and development, current state, and possible future direction. Four of the chapters are expository in nature while one is based more directly on research. All deal with important areas of mathematics, however, such as algebraic geometry, topology, partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry, and harmonic analysis. This book is addressed to researchers who are interested in those subject areas. Young-Hoon Kiem discusses classical enumerative geometry before string theory and improvements after string theory as well as some recent advances in quantum singularity theory, Donaldson-Thomas theory for Calabi-Yau 4-folds, and Vafa-Witten invariants. Dongho Chae discusses the finite-time singularity problem for three-dimensional incompressible Euler equations. He presents Kato's classical local well-posedness results, Beale-Kato-Majda's blow-up criterion, and recent studies on the singularity problem for the 2D Boussinesq equations. Simon Brendle discusses recent developments that have led to a complete classification of all the singularity models in a three-dimensional Riemannian manifold. He gives an alternative proof of the classification of noncollapsed steady gradient Ricci solitons in dimension 3. Hyeonbae Kang reviews some of the developments in the Neumann-Poincare operator (NPO). His topics include visibility and invisibility via polarization tensors, the decay rate of eigenvalues and surface localization of plasmon, singular geometry and the essential spectrum, analysis of stress, and the structure of the elastic NPO. Danny Calegari provides an explicit description of the shift locus as a complex of spaces over a contractible building. He describes the pieces in terms of dynamically extended laminations and of certain explicit "discriminant-like" affine algebraic varieties.

Sang Hyun examines Aleksander Pushkin's artistic intention in his masterpiece and most well-known prose work, The Tales of Belkin (1831). The author explores the trajectories of the puzzle Pushkin created in the Belkin cycle by identifying and elucidating autobiographical, folklorist, and thematic elements. Drawing on both formalist and structuralist approaches to a literary work, Kim's analysis demonstrates how the five tales in the Belkin cycle are interwoven structurally and thematically. Kim's interpretation should help future readers understand the enigmatic meaning of Pushkin's stories created in the Belkin cycle.

This book presents the theory of optimal and critical regularities of groups of diffeomorphisms, from the classical work of Denjoy and Herman, up through recent advances. Beginning with an investigation of regularity phenomena for single diffeomorphisms, the book goes on to describes a circle of ideas surrounding Filipkiewicz's Theorem, which recovers the smooth structure of a manifold from its full diffeomorphism group. Topics covered include the simplicity of homeomorphism groups, differentiability of continuous Lie group actions, smooth conjugation of diffeomorphism groups, and the reconstruction of spaces from group actions. Various classical and modern tools are developed for controlling the dynamics of general finitely generated group actions on one-dimensional manifolds, subject to regularity bounds, including material on Thompson's group F, nilpotent groups, right-angled Artin groups, chain groups, finitely generated groups with prescribed critical regularities, and applications to foliation theory and the study of mapping class groups. The book will be of interest to researchers in geometric group theory.

In this partly expository work, a framework is developed for building exotic circle actions of certain classical groups. The authors give general combination theorems for indiscrete isometry groups of hyperbolic space which apply to Fuchsian and limit groups. An abundance of integer-valued subadditive defect-one quasimorphisms on these groups follow as a corollary. The main classes of groups considered are limit and Fuchsian groups. Limit groups are shown to admit large collections of faithful actions on the circle with disjoint rotation spectra. For Fuchsian groups, further flexibility results are proved and the existence of non-geometric actions of free and surface groups is established. An account is given of the extant notions of semi-conjugacy, showing they are equivalent. This book is suitable for experts interested in flexibility of representations, and for non-experts wanting an introduction to group representations into circle homeomorphism groups.